


Keep A Close Watch (ties that bind)

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron)-centric, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Grieving, Hurt/Comfort, allura is a hot mess, at least two ill-advised make-outs, but that's not saying much, depending on your jurisdiction, lance is less of a mess than allura, love bug fic, tongue-tied lance, under age drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 04:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12183159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: When Keith gets bitten by a love-bug (and really, what bad Star Trek trope weren't they going to re-enact, Lance wants to know) and starts following Lance around like a love-struck puppy made of awkwardness and resentment, it really wasn't a surprise that Lance started to hide in random places around the castle.What was a surprise was how Allura kept tripping over him.(Not that either of them end up minding. At all.)(Or, a 5+1 fic for the pairing of my heart.)





	Keep A Close Watch (ties that bind)

It takes Lance less than 24 hours to start hiding from Keith after his unfortunate exposure to a tomusqua (“A lovebug?” Lance’d asked with two fingers pressed to his temples like they hurt and an impressive eye twitch. “Is there a Star Trek episode we _aren’t_ going to re-enact?”) bite. 

Not that Allura’d been counting. Apparently that’d been the purview of Hunk and Pidge who’d made some sort of bet. When Keith wanders into the common room looking a toddler that can’t find his favorite stuffed toy—full of sorrow, petulance, and two-heartbeats away from an epic emotional temper tantrum—and announces that he can’t find Lance and obviously the Galra had kidnapped him, Hunk spins around to Pidge with more agility than Allura’d thought possible. 

“Pay up,” Hunk announces, one eyebrow cocked and a rare smug smile curling on his lips. 

Pidge hunkers deeper into the couches, pulls the laptop onto her lap like a shield and frowns without looking up at her compatriot. “This isn’t fair. You’ve known him longer.”

Hunk makes a little ‘gimme’ gesture with his fingers. “You made a bet,” he sings, self-satisfied pleasure in every word. “I tried to warn you, but you did it anyway.”

“Fine,” Pidge grumbles, slaps something into Hunk’s palm. “It still isn’t fair.”

Hunk shrugs. “You knew that before you made the bet.”

“I thought he’d hold out a little longer,” Pidge not quite whines. “Like, he’s getting snuggles and affection, what’s his deal?”

“Man, you really don’t know him at all,” Hunk says fondly and pats her on the head, making her swat at his hand like a kitten after an offending appendage. “He’s allergic to drama.”

“I don’t think it’s really appropriate to be making bets that involve your teammates’ current … difficulty,” Shiro says severely while Keith looks like someone kicked his favorite puppy. Allura wonders if he realizes that everyone _but_ Keith notices the way he reaches out to place a comforting hand on his shoulder, only to pull back after a heartbeat of indecision. 

Hunk gives Shiro an impossibly bland look and makes a non-committal noise in the back of his throat. 

“I think we should all try to be supportive,” Shiro says and Allura has to bite her bottom lip when Pidge looks over the top her laptop to catch Allura’s gaze before rolling her eyes so hard Allura is impressed that she didn’t give herself a headache. “And understanding of how difficult this is on everyone.”

Hunk makes another non-committal noise and shares a side-long look with Pidge. “Sure, Shiro,” they chorus with such fake sweetness their tone could be used as a diet sweetener. 

“Guys,” Shiro sighs as Keith’s shoulders curl even more inward.

Allura sneaks out as surreptitiously as she can, well aware that Shiro probably notices but allows her to slink away because he can’t actually call her out in her own castle. Hunk catches her eye as she slides out the door. ‘ _Find Lance_ ,’ he mouths at her. Allura blinks in surprise, but nods. Hunk beams at her and Pidge’s glasses catch the light in a way that is frankly unsettling.

Her personal datapad dings softly with alert of an incoming message. _Try your lion_ , the message from Pidge reads. _He always goes to Blue when he’s upset_. 

Allura wonders idly why Hunk and Pidge would know precisely where Lance would be hiding when Keith apparently couldn’t find him even with all the painful longing the neurotoxins the tomusqua bite could produce coursing through his veins. She puts that thought aside as she approaches the main doors to Blue’s hanger. A little frisson of trepidation runs up her spine as she walks up to her lion only to find its particle field lowered and one former Blue Paladin draped over her massive paw like puppet with all its strings cut.

“Yo, Princess,” Lance calls in lazy greeting, not bothering to haul his lanky frame into a sitting position. “I swear I’m not here to jack your ride. I just needed a little down time.”

“I …,” Allura blinks slowly, voice trailing off in confusion as she’s confronted with the avalanche of words. Half of which she isn’t even sure she understands. “’Jack my ride’?” She repeats, wincing at how foolish she sounds. “I don’t. Um. I’m sorry?”

At that Lance finally finds the motivation to swing himself into a languid seat, one arm propped on a bent knee, chin cupped in one long-fingered hand. He favors her with an amused half-smile. “Sorry, guess the translation programs don’t do old Earth slang?”

She laughs in spite of herself and lets herself be drawn closer by his easy comradery and air of sly conspiracy. She’s reminded suddenly of planning pranks at school, heart panging suddenly at the memory. “Apparently not.”

Lance shakes his head in a dramatic, overacting parody of dismay. “That’s a damned tragic shame, Princess,” he tells her, eyes twinkling in mirth even as his face is set in sorrowing seriousness. “You should really make sure someone fixes that. Think of the universe, Princess. Think of it.”

Allura hauls herself up her lion’s paw to settle next to him, pulls her knees to her chest and regards him with as much overdone seriousness. “The universe will clearly fall if we don’t have old Earth idioms in our translation program,” she agrees, but can’t keep the laughter out of her voice. “I’ll have Coran look at it first thing.”

“Good!” Lance crows. “The universe depends on it.”

They both snicker for a moment and Allura wonders when they had fallen into this new dynamic—easy and teasing, like seriousness never had any place between them. “So what does it mean,” she asks, rests her cheek against her knee and favors him with an easy smile. “And while you’re at it, would you like tell me why you’re hiding with my lion?”

Lance makes a face. “I’m not _hiding_.”

“Lying!” She sings and pokes him in the ribs making him giggle and squirm away from him. She lets him sidle out of her range before pinning him with a look. “I know a tomusqua bite can be difficult to, ah, manage when there are feelings.”

Lance looks at her for a long moment before blinking slowly—the sweep of his eyelashes dark and full across his cheek—and then raises an eyebrow. “I’m not the one having feelings.”

“I know,” she sighs. “Shiro is.”

Lance laughs softly, something caught between bemusement and affection twisting his lips into a wry smile. “Think if we lock them in a closet long enough they’ll figure themselves out?”

Allura tilts her head, letting her hair sweep over her shoulder and across her knee like a cloak. “Pidge already suggested that and then Hunk made a joke about closets and coming out of them that I didn’t understand.”

Lance starts laughing so hard he starts hiccupping slightly, buries his head in his knees while the giggles wrack his shoulders. Allura pokes him the side both pleased to see the return of Lance’s infectious good humour—it had been steadily taxed since Zarkon’s return and Lotor’s endless gambits to use the paladins against his father—and annoyed that she _still_ didn’t get the joke. Lance bats at her hand without looking up. She pokes him again, fingers finding the ridges of his ribs and digging in, making him squeak and squirm away from her. He grabs her hand, turns his face on his knees to smile at her—soft and fond. “Playing dirty,” he accuses, voice breathless from his giggles. “Is that anyway a princess should behave?”

Allura makes a face at him, folds against her knees to mimic his posture. She’s struck again, as she is so often these days, at how they reflect each other, but then red and blue paladins have always been each other’s mirror. “I’m a princess,” she tells him with as much imperious command as she can shove in her tone. “I can act any way I damned well want.”

“Damned right,” Lance agrees with a grin. Allura blinks as a wash of warmth spills through her at his easy grin. He reaches out and tucks a stray lock behind her ear. “You doing better in there?”

“Me?” Allura asks and can’t stop the way confusion twists her expression. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Uh, let’s see,” Lance says and leans back on one arm to count off on his fingers. “One, you’re suddenly a paladin of Voltron, but not the lion you wanted—though Blue is, objectively speaking the best—” a roar from the red lion’s hanger makes Lance roll his eyes. “Not that I don’t love you,” he calls back over his shoulder. “But you’re a pushy bitch and you know it.” Another roar rattles the floor and Lance laughs softly under his breath, fond smile tugging at his lips—crooked and tiny, and something under Allura’s ribs flips. “You can yell all you want, you know I’m right.”

A giggle bursts out of Allura before she can catch it—rattles her helplessly and leaves her breathless. “I don’t think you are supposed to talk to your lion like that.”

Lance shrugs one shoulder. “She deserves it and she likes the sass.” For a moment his expression goes that curiously blank all paladins get when their lions talk to them—she wonders if her face does the same when Blue gets chatty. Then he makes a face caught between pleased and dismayed, every part of it done in undertones of awkwardness. “She, uh. She says I remind her of her first paladin.”

… oh.

Allura bounces a little, wraps her arms around her knees, chews on her lip and feels every word she has fly straight out of her head. Lance sighs and looks away from her, fixes his gaze at some unknown middle distance. “Sorry.”

“No, no!” Allura’s hand fly up like startled birds and flutter between them useless. “Don’t be sorry. It’s, it’s not a bad thing.”

Lance catches her hands in his, pulls them down and keeps them trapped in his grasp. She can only stare at them helplessly, feel the warmth of his palms seep into her fingers. He tightens his grip a little, making her look up at him. “Sorry,” Lance repeats softly. 

“It’s okay,” she says, matching his tone—and she keeps doing that, matching his tempo, finding his rhythm and following it. She gives him a crooked smile. “I’m glad,” she sucks in a breath and blows it out all at once. “I’m glad there’s something left of him in the universe.”

Lance gives her another small smile, squeezes her hands gently before letting them go. “What say we go find Keith and Shiro before they implode in a fit of barely controlled angst and bad miscommunication tropes?”

Allura curls her fingers in her sleeves, pretends like she can still feel the warmth of his hands, and gives him a smile she knows looks forced. “Or before Pidge actually does lock them in a closet.”

The grin she gets in return is sly, conspiratorial, and somewhere in the back of her mind bubbles up a thought, a faint whisper of ‘oh no.’

///

By the fourth day of dealing with Keith under the influence of the tomusqua bite (“No, Shiro,” Allura finds herself reassuring her increasingly worried paladin. “It is not possible for the bite to be permanent.”) Hunk and Pidge start taking bets as to where Lance will try to hide from Keith next.

“Those weird observation decks above the training room,” Hunk says, slapping down a piece of paper with his slanting script scrawled over it. “Three chores and one minor project.”

Pidge pushes glasses up her nose, considers the little pile of notes, nods and adds another. “I see that bet and add one major electrical project,” she announces with the serious of a surgeon announcing an aggressive treatment plan. “And I say the shuttle hangers.”

“Too broad,” Hunk objects while Shiro frowns at the pair of them. “Those things are huge!”

Pidge makes a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Okay, shuttle hangers, in that far corner with all the low grav speeders. You know he likes tinkering with those.”

“Yeah,” Hunk sighs, fond and amused. “He really does.”

“Guys,” Shiro says with disapproval heavy in his tone. “Please tell me you aren’t doing what I think you are doing.”

Allura chews on her bottom lip to keep from giggling as their engineers turn big, innocent eyes on Shiro. Pidge shrugs. “Okay, then we won’t.”

“It’s really not appropriate to make fun of them like this,” Shiro chides. Hunk and Pidge exchange a look and then shrug as one, unrepentant and unashamed.

“We’re not really making fun of _them_ ,” Pidge protests. “Just Lance.”

Hunk shrugs. “It’s not like Lance wouldn’t do the same if it was one of us.”

Shiro looks as if he wants to say something about that, but can’t quite find the words. “It’s still not appropriate to bet on either of them while things are so difficult,” he argues, frowning at both of them. “You wouldn’t want them betting on you if you were in that situation.”

Hunk looks deeply amused. “If Lance _didn’t_ bet on me I’d worry he’d been replaced by pod-people.”

And that’s an argument that, if Allura has learned anything in the past couple of days, has no easy resolution. Neither Hunk nor Pidge could see anything wrong with making fun of Lance as he tried, with increasingly difficulty, to avoid Keith and all his attendant awkwardness. While Shiro’s serious nature could not find the fun in gentle teasing; couldn’t see the way that Hunk and Pidge tried to make the situation easier by turning it into a game, into a joke. 

Catching Pidge’s gaze, Allura makes a small hand gesture towards the door. Pidge gives her a small why-are-you-abandoning-me-to-this frown but gives her a tiny thumbs up. Thus absolved of any guilt for abandoning her green paladin to the brewing thunderstorm of an argument, Allura sidles out the door.

She’s been slinking around her own castle more now than she ever did as a misbehaving child.

Scanning the hallway surreptitiously for Keith’s lurking figure, Allura hunkers down and calls the mice to her. “Have you seen Lance?” she whispers to them. “We should probably find him before Keith does.”

The quartet chirp at her, Platt and Chulatt running up her arms to nestle against her neck while Plachu runs towards his favorite paladin like an arrow loosened from a bow. Allura giggles as they race through the castle halls, hiding behind pillars and weaving through the shadows like they were playing a complicated game of hide-and-seek with an unknown opponent.

Eventually Plachu leads them to a part of the castle that Allura had almost forgotten existed. 

Overgrown flowering vines twine their way towards the vaulted ceiling, the air smells loam and rich dirt, and the air moves with unseen currents that made neglected flowers bob and bounce. Allura pushes her way past towering shrubs grown enormous and wild, clothes catching on thorns, face brushed by blossoms the universe had long since forgotten. She presses a hand against her mouth, fights the urge to cry and stands shaking slightly in the remnants of the gardens her mother had loved so much.

“I forgot,” she whispers to the mice. “How could I have forgotten?”

“I did wonder if you knew about this place,” Lance’s voice echoes through the neglected and forgotten garden, ringing oddly off the overtaken walls. “Cause it’s kinda a mess.”

Allura bites her lip until it nearly bleeds, reaches inside herself until she can find her diplomat’s smile and then turns to her blue—no, red now—red paladin. “I don’t think anyone but you has been in here since, well.”

“Since you fell asleep?” Lance asks bluntly, but his voice is gentle. Allura opens her mouth to respond and finds her voice won’t work quite right, so she just nods. He ambles up to her, hands tucked into his pockets, shoulders at a comfortable slouch. “It’s pretty,” he says easily, studying the flowers. Giving her, Allura realizes with a start, the chance to compose herself. “Kinda glad that this bullshit with Keith happened, if it means I found this place.”

Allura laughs shakily, presses the back of her hand against her mouth, nods jerkily. “I’m glad something good has come out of this awful situation.”

“Aww, princess,” Lance says, blinks impossibly blue eyes at her. “The way you say that makes it sound like anyone falling for me is terrible.”

Allura’s hands fly up as if magnetized. “No, no!” She denies furiously. “I didn’t mea—” she cuts off suddenly as if her vocal cords had been cut. Frowns at him as Lance grins her, smug and amused. “You’re teasing me.”

“More myself,” Lance answers cryptically. “What was this place?”

Allura curls around herself, arms crossed over her chest in a thoroughly ineffective self-hug. “My mother’s gardens.”

She jerks, startled, when Lance gently, carefully, pulls her into his arms. She can’t keep herself from going limp and boneless as he gathers her against his chest, tucks her under his chin. Allura lets him press her head to his chest where she can hear his heart beat in a steady rhythm, a drumbeat against his chest that says he’s alive, he’s here, and he’s not going anywhere. She lets herself be cradled as if she were something impossibly precious and fragile. Fights to find a regular breath. 

Lance shifts around her, his arms a loose cage that she knows would fall the second any part of her looks as if she wants to be free, but she keeps herself pressed to him—face hidden against his chest. He rests a cautious hand against her head. “What was she like?” He asks and Allura can feel the question thrum through him, closes her eyes and lets herself steal, just for a few moments, his warmth. She wonders vaguely if it’s a human thing to run so warm, or if once becoming the paladin of the red lion his base temperature had jumped. “Can you tell me?”

Allura blows out a breath, winces when it’s a little wet. Lance runs a cautious, gentle hand down her shoulder and back up, making an unsure circuit up and down her back. “You don’t have to,” he says against her hair. “If it’s too much.”

She’s being weak, Allura knows. Being selfish to steal these moments of strength and warmth from Lance when he has so little for himself. “No,” she says softly. Secrets, she thinks nonsensically, they are sharing secrets. “I can talk about her. I should. Someone should remember her.”

Lance pulls back carefully, gently, as if she would shatter into a million pieces of he moved too quickly. She feels as if she should would—all parts of her forgetting their own gravitational pull towards each other, borrowing instead Lance’s sudden and unexpected stability. She blinks, dazed under the weight of her own emotions, as his hands slide delicate and sure down her arms to catch her wrists in a loose grip. Follows him like a fawn after their mother, stumbling and unsure on her feet, until he presses her with heart-shattering gentleness to sit on the edge of a long-forgotten terrace.

“In your own time,” he says in that same whispering pitch. “If you want.”

Allura gives him rueful smile, cocks her head to study him as if just seeing him for the first time. And in so many ways she feels like she is seeing for the first time. Lance without his armour of insincere flirtation and causal dismissal. Lance with all the ways in which he cares—cares so, so painfully much—on display. It would be so easy, she realizes with a start, to hurt him now. To pretend as if she didn’t care. To dismiss his attempts at comfort. The sudden and unlooked-for vulnerability leaves her breathless in ways she can scarce understand.

“I’m not sure where to start,” she murmurs, presses the knuckles of one hand against her lips, refuses to look him in the eye. She hears rather than sees the way he shrugs, deceptively causal like he wasn’t giving her every opportunity to eviscerate his delicate sense of self-esteem. 

“Where you can find the words,” he suggests, and she blinks at the eminently sensible suggestion. “Even if it seems silly, or stupid, or trivial.”

Allura blows out a breath. This was not the way she’d thought this conversation would go when she went looking for Lance. Imagined herself offering comfort to her recalcitrant and troubled paladin, not being offered comfort instead. “Not how I expected my day to go,” she tells him with overdone seriousness, “when I woke up this morning.”

“I tell myself that pretty much every day,” Lance says with rueful look. “No game plans really include fighting giant, purple space chinchillas in semi-sentient robot lions. You roll with it,” he tells her. “Or drink heavily. And,” he sighs heavily, shoulders lifting and falling in overacted exhaustion. “Since we have no whiskey, coping awkwardly is it.”

Allura laughs softly despite not understanding a solid fifty percent of the words that spilled from Lance like water down a waterfall. “What’s a chinchilla?” she waves that question away as Lance opens his mouth. “Wait, no. More important, what’s whiskey?”

Lance laughs, curls forward with the force of it, looks up at her from under his bangs and Allura feels her heart give a quick, pathetic throb as she meets his gaze—as blue as her lion and twinkling like stars with the force of his mirth. “Nah,” he breathes as he hauls himself upright. “I think introducing whiskey into this situation is pretty much guaranteed to make everything, way, waaaay worse,” he grins at her, lopsided and not quite reaching his eyes. “I think Keith having bad impulse control,” Lance pauses, seems to think for a moment. “Well, worse impulse control than usual, is enough without introducing the team to booze.”

Allura blinks at him. “That explanation did not actually help,” she complains and pokes him the side. “All you did was give me more words that I don’t know.”

“Man, Princess,” Lance says, tone light and teasing. “Your translation program really needs help.”

She studies him for a long moment, notes the dark circles under his eyes, the lines of exhaustion at the edges of his lips. “Are you all right?” She asks, cutting over his deflecting humor. “You seem tired.”

Lance grimace and rubs a hand across his nose. “Ouch, Princess, dang.”

“I’m worried,” she says and shoves at his shoulder. “Don’t pretend like we don’t have reason to be.”

She startles when Lance reaches out and taps her nose. “And there’s Princess Seriousness,” he chides, grinning at her. “Don’t worry about it, Allura. Seriously. I’m fine.”

She has to bite down hard to keep the sudden flush of pleasure that spreads through her at the sound of her name on his lips. She’s not sure why it catches her so off-guard or sends a rush of warmth through her veins like the first sip of uisce beatha. “Are you?” She asks. He opens his mouth and she can see the lie written across his features as easily as she can read a children’s story. “Don’t lie to me. Please.”

Lance runs a hand through his hair and laughs a little like he doesn’t know what else to do. “Man,” he says and Allura gets the sense its more to himself than to her. “I do not know what to do with this.”

Allura blinks. “This?”

He just shakes his head, rubs the back of his neck and looks at her through his lashes. “I’m not okay,” he says and his honesty cuts like a newly sharpened blade, leaves parts of her bleeding for him. “But I’ll get there.”

She can’t help the way her eyes narrow at him, distrust humming through her like a live wire. She knows Lance at this point, knows when he’s deflecting, but this seems honest. Or at least as honest as he’s willing to be with her. Something around her heart twinges like an over-tight piano string at the idea that he doesn’t feel comfortable enough with her to be truly honest. “If you,” she stumbles over herself, unsure how to make the offer. “If I can—”

Lance cuts her off with a raised hand and an expression she doesn’t know how to interpret. “Thanks, Princess,” he says and he shakes his head when she tries to interject. “No, really. I get it. No need to force yourself.”

“I’m not forcing myself,” she snaps, insulted. She reaches out and taps his nose—an echo of his gesture that makes him wrinkle his nose and her smile. “I’m a princess, remember?” Allura chides, lets her voice fall into playful patterns, tilts her head and smiles smug and self-satisfied—a pale reflection of Lance at his most charming (most dishonest). “I can do whatever I damned well want.”

Lance blinks at her, lets out a bark of laughter, eyes crinkling in amusement over the hand he presses against his mouth. “Right,” he says and nods as if affirming something for himself. “Yeah, you are.”

Allura pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, repeat of that first evening of dealing Keith post-tomusqua-bite, and lets her head fall heavy and tired against her knees. Considers Lance for so long that he starts to squirm, the silence stretching awkward and odd between them. “You know I like spending time with you, right?” She asks, ruthlessly shoves her own flush of embarrassment and discomfort at the confession in a box. It seemed more important, vital even, that Lance know that simple truth. More important that her vague and inexplicable feelings of shyness and embarrassment. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

Lance blinks at her, a slow sweep of dark, dark lashes against brown skin only a couple of shades lighter than her own. “I, uh.” Lance swallows hard, looks away from her with a laugh that sounds caught between incredulity and hope. “Yeah. Yeah, Princess. I get it.”

Allura keeps her gaze locked on his, resists the urge to hide behind her hair, and raises an eyebrow at him slowly. “Do you?” She lets herself ask. Takes all her self-consciousness and awkwardness and shoves it down, down, down until there’s nothing left but a whisper, a tremor, of nerves. “I wonder about that sometimes.”

“You’re ruthless,” Lance says nonsensically. “Like, you leave no places to hide, do you?”

Allura isn’t sure what he’s talking about exactly, can’t follow the twisting path of his thoughts as he jumps from one thing to another, so she just shrugs slightly. “I wasn’t taught to be subtle.”

That makes Lance laugh so hard tears spring up in the corners of his eyes. He throws his head back and cackles long peels of mirth that make her grin even though she’s not sure what has amused him so. “Fuck,” he breathes, voice uneven and trembling with the aftershocks of his sudden laughing fit. “I guess you weren’t.”

She smiles at him, happy to see him so relaxed, so at ease despite all the uncertainty surrounding them like waves crashing upon the shore—endless and unforgiving. “Feel better?” She asks, his answer suddenly more important than the war with the Galra. More important than solving the riddle of Lotor’s newest gambit. “Honestly?”

Lance smiles at her—crooked, fond, and it breaks her heart in a million ways she doesn’t understand. “Yeah, Princess, yeah, I do.”

She reaches out and shoves him lightly, he rocks with the force of it—dramatic and overdone, laughing and grinning and more brilliant than a dying star. “Good,” she tells him. “Blue paladins have to stick together.”

Lance cocks his head, considers her with a thoughtful look that makes her want to squirm. “Yeah. I guess we do.”

Allura rolls to her feet, stretches with more an arch and roll than is really required for reasons she doesn’t want to look at too deeply. “We should probably get back,” she says over her shoulder, hopes her reluctance doesn’t show. “I need to tell Hunk and Pidge that both of their bets were wrong.”

“They bet on me?” Lance yelps, offense colouring his tone as sloppy and indignant as five-year-old without a nap. 

“You’re surprised?” She asks, turns to face him fully, hands on her hips, head cocked and hair spilling across her shoulders like a wave. “Really?”

“Well, no,” he admits as he stares up at her. “But I feel like I should be offended on general principles.”

Allura laughs, holds a hand out to him and hauls him up when he grabs her forearm, grasp firm and certain. “You can always tell them” she says, choosing to ignore the way her voice goes breathy and a little high to have him so close to her, fingers wrapped around her arm. “They’d stop if you asked.”

Lance makes a low, thoughtful noise in the back of his throat as he studies her through half-lidded eyes. Her heart picks up and decides to suddenly go from zero to a million miles a minute and she suddenly has to fight to keep from fidgeting under that surprisingly intense scrutiny. “You know,” Lance drawls, slow and teasing, making her blink in sudden trepidation. “You never did tell me about your mother.” He pulls a bit of vine from her hair, fingers gentle and sure as they untangle it from her hair—a simple, easy gesture and she wonders when did they get so comfortable with each other? “Don’t think I didn’t notice you dodging that.”

Allura huffs a laugh and cocks her head to the side to study him. When did he get so clever, she wonders? When did he learn her habits and her tells? “I’m not dodging,” she denies and chews her lip at his arched brow. “We just got distracted.”

“Lying!” He sings—a parody, though a friendly one, of her own teasing call out of his poor attempts to deflect her questions. 

She can’t help but laugh even as her gaze slides away from his and she shrugs a little. “Seemed more important to make sure you were okay.”

Lance makes that thoughtful noise again, a small, crooked smile curling on his lips like he knew something she didn’t. “Appreciated, Princess,” he says quietly, tucks his hands in his jacket pockets and rocks back on his heels. His gaze stays steady and serious as he studies her. “But you’re important too, you know?” He taps her nose. “Blue paladins have to stick together.”

She bats his hand away, wrinkling her nose. “No using my words against me.”

Lance laughs at that and her lips quirk in response to the sound. When, she wonders, did she start hearing all the different tones to his laughter? He shrugs his shoulders a little, tilts his head to the side in a cocky, self-assured gesture that’s become as familiar as Coran’s mustache twirl. “Damn, Princess,” he chides. “You keep shutting down all my ways of interacting.”

“You could,” she replies, trying for dry and amused, rather than pleading, “try being honest.”

She can’t decipher the expression that flits across his features, face shuttering briefly. “Yeah,” and his tone is so much more serious than she thought the situation required. “I might try that.”

///

The mineral baths are a vast network of pools that steam gently in the cool, recycled air of the castle. Emerald waters murky in the permanent twilight of the baths as the ship tries to maintain the ecosystem of a long-forgotten planet, one already killed and consumed by the Galra and their unending appetite for quintessence. Allura steals along the tiles shaped in memory of rock formations no human eyes will ever see and fights the wave nostalgic sorrow that threatens to drown her fragile heart. 

The water ripples with the faint vibrations that thrum through the castle’s floors, up through its metal and wire veins like the purr of a great cat, like the purr of Blue when Allura wanders too closely to crippling longing. She kneels at the edge of the main pool and dips her fingers into the water, feels it slide across her fingers like silk. She rubs her fingertips together gently, wondering if the baths need recalibration given the near opaque quality of the pools. She can’t recall any more, not truly, what the pools looked like at the peak of their glory.

She remembers splashing in the water with her mother. Refusing to behave as her attendants attempted to corral her into gentle reverence of the pools and their healing qualities. But she can’t quite remember how the water gleamed, clung to her skin, slid through her hair. She remembers her echoing shouts, but not the gentle lapping of sedate waves. 

Pressing the back of her palm to her mouth she blinks hard. Once. Twice. Thrice and banishes the memory for later introspection. 

Not now. Not when her body aches with a thousand pains from being tossed about Blue’s cockpit like a ragdoll made of fragile tissue and delicate bone. 

Allura feels vaguely guilty that she still hasn’t told the paladins about the mineral baths. In her defense, she’d forgotten them until she became Blue’s pilot and suddenly all the aches and pains of a particularly difficult battle became more than an academic concern. And now she just wants to hold onto the quiet and solitude of the baths for a little longer. She tells herself she’d tell them after the next battle.

She will.

After the next battle.

She will! 

Just, later.

Sliding into the water with breathy sigh of pleasure, Allura let herself go boneless, float limp and weightless in the deep emerald water. The sharp, biting smell of vesna burns through her senses and she breathes deep to drag the cleansing scent in. Dragging her fingers through her hair, she spreads it around her in a vast cloud, strands moving with false currents produced by the ship’s electronic heartbeat. Lets herself indulge in the decadence of not having anywhere to be or anything to do. 

Listens to her breathing slow in the steam to near sleeping and all but purrs in simple pleasure of doing nothing as her muscles unknot one by one under the water’s steady movement. 

Allura loses track, a little bit, as she drifts in artificial mineral pools—made for a semi-aquatic species she wasn’t even sure still existed. 

She drifts, half-asleep and undreaming in the silent pools, like a maid sacrificed to some ancient and forgotten sea-god of unpredictable temper.

A ringing whoop of sound—a battle cry of joy and unrestrained exuberance—is her only warning before a tidal wave of jewel-toned water drags her to the bottom of the pools and leaves her stunned and stuttering in its wake. Allura drags herself to stand, chest high in the waters, coughing and clawing her sodden hair out of her face. Through the heavy, drenched fall of her hair she locks eyes with Lance who stares at her with eyes blown wide in shock and embarrassment.

“ _HOLY SHIT!_ ”

“ _QUIZNAK!_ ”

Later, she thinks to herself distantly, later she will find this funny. Find it hilarious the way they both dive back under the murky water and peer at each other with the flame of humiliation and surprise turning their complexions ruddy. Later she will laugh to herself at the way that they both wrap protective, shielding hands around the delicate places of their bodies and sputter in baffled mortification. 

But right _now_? Right in this moment of stunned horror? She can only hide herself under the faint protection of cloudy waters of the mineral baths and pray that some benevolent deity will come remove her from this reality and all its attendant humiliation. 

“Why are you here?!” Lance sputters at her, blinks, turns two shades darker (something she didn’t think possible) and then spins to face the far wall.

Allura chews on her bottom lip, stares at his back (notes faintly, in the back of her mind, that it’s so much broader than she thought), and snaps in humiliated defensiveness. “It’s my castle!”

Lance’s shoulders shake minutely and Allura frowns at him, water lapping delicately at her chin where she huddles under its dubious protection.

“Are you laughing at me?” she asks with suspicion lacing her tone as deadly as arsenic.

“Never, Princess,” he denies. “I have a functioning sense of self-preservation unlike certain mullet-haired jerk who will remain nameless.”

That drags a laugh out of Allura despite herself. She presses fingers against her lips and wills herself not to giggle. “Lance!” She yelps, tries to chide. “That’s mean.”

He doesn’t turn around, keeps his face resolutely pointed to the far wall, spreads his hands in supplication. “Am I wrong?”

She studies his broad back, tries not to notice the way his muscles move under dark skin, and lets herself slowly stand—reassured that he’ll stay safely facing away from her. “Still mean,” she rebukes, but the laughter in her voice is obvious to anyone with ears to hear. “How did you know about these pools?”

Lance makes an aborted gesture with his hands, shrugs one shoulder (Allura bites the inside of her cheek hard. _oh no._ Watches the muscles there tense and move.) and turns thoughtful. She’s not sure how she knows, but she can see the pensive mood steal across him as easily as she can spot storm clouds on a distant horizon. “Princess,” he says and there’s a note in his voice that she’s not sure she’s heard before. “Do you really think I wouldn’t find a body of water in this place? I tripped over these pools, like, the second week we were here.”

Allura doesn’t know how long a week is, but she can hear the pain of measuring time spent in longing as easily as a battle claxon. Breathes in, breathes out, and steels herself. She moves towards him as quietly as she knows how, with all the stealth her trainers beat into her, while his voice washes over her like a gentle wave. 

“I mean,” Lance continues and she can hear his nerves in his tone—in the way it shakes his voice at the edges of his words, makes him stumble over hard consonances and slide too fast and slurring through vowels as if he expected the words to be shaped differently—and smiles to herself. “I am, er, was the Blue paladin. I’m _meant_ to like water. Like I guess you are? I mea—”

His voice dies in his throat as suddenly as a bird meeting a windshield—shattering and heartbreaking—when Allura places a careful hand on his shoulder. “You are welcome here,” she tells him simply. Fights to keep her voice calm and steady, denies herself the luxury of quaking. “I meant to tell everyone earlier. I’ve just been … selfish.”

Lance shudders under her hand like a racehorse after fierce ride—muscles jumping, breath stuttering. She can feel the way he rolls his shoulders back in a bid for self-control. “I think,” his voice breaks softly and he swallows hard before continuing, “I think you’re allowed to be selfish, a little, Allura.”

Allura pulls in a deep, subtle breath—tries to hide the way her heart seizes like an engine run too long and too hot—at the sound of her name across his lips. Not a thing, she thinks in dazed realization, that she will ever get used to. She lets go of his shoulder, breathes in slowly, presses her fingertips against her lips like she could steal his warmth through them. “Still,” she says, cringes at the unsteadiness of her voice. “You are welcome here.”

Lance tips his head up the ceiling, and she can watch his slender neck move with the force of his swallow. “Don’t think you should say that to me,” he whispers, voice gone hoarse and rasping. “All things considered.”

Allura pulls her hand back carefully, slowly, not at all like she’s snatching her fingers back from a fire. She’s painful, horribly aware of water moving in sluggish waves against her chest, just under her breasts, of the line of his throat as he stands with his face tipped to the ceiling, hands fisted at his sides like he doesn’t trust what he’d do with them otherwise. She takes a careful step away from him, and then another, and another until her back hits the edge of the pool. Clutching her hands between her breasts she breathes out a shaky breath and tries to find a diplomat’s path out of this.

Lance raises a hand to rub at the back of his neck. She tracks its movement up from the water, dripping and graceful. He rubs a hand through the short hair at his nape, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. “Not,” he says with a tone of self-deprecating humor she has always hated. “The way I expected my day to go.”

She can’t help the laugh that bubbles up through her throat like air bubbles from abyssal depths. “I don’t even try to imagine how my day will go any more.”

Lance makes a noise caught between amusement and frustration. “True, true,” he sighs. “Man, what I wouldn’t give for whiskey. I’m pretty sure that’s the only way any of this shit would make sense.”

Allura makes a little sound of confusion before she can stop herself. 

Lance’s hands drop into the water with a heavy splash. She watches the way the waves surge up his sides before stilling to easy laps. Chews on her lips as he stands with back resolutely to her. She’s not sure what she wants him to do, what she’s afraid he’ll do. She trapped between desperate longing and terrible fear of two unknowns and she doesn’t know how to balance them. She wishes for the Voltron bond between them to be active so she could just _look_ and know.

Lance drags a hand through his hair again, breathes out so heavily she can see his shoulders heave with the force of it. “I’m just gonna,” he makes a little gesture with one hand towards the door, “go, I think.”

“No, no, I can leave,” she says immediately, guilt clawing at her feral and raw.

He laughs for reasons she can’t figure out, shoulders bowing, breath coming out in a stuttered rhythm caught between mirth and humiliation. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he comments with a lightness that even she can tell is forced. “All things considered.”

He points towards the doors with both hands over his head. “Better if I just, you know, vamoose.”

“Lance,” she says, despairing as she fails to find any argument, only knowing that she’s made things harder for him once again.

“Lance?” 

Keith’s voice makes them both freeze like they’d been hit by Blue’s freeze ray. Then they both dunk under the water as if choreographed. Allura clutches at her hair and screams internally for a long moment before surfacing. “Keith?” She calls, hears him stumble to a surprised halt. “Um. Could you, uh, just—”

“Freeze, mullet,” Lance calls, voice firmer than hers ever could be given the circumstances. “Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, stay right the fuck there.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Lance,” Keith complains, but the sound of his voice comes no closer. “How would I collect two hundred dollars?”

“Have you never played monopoly?” Lance asks, incredulity driving his voice into high pitches. “The destroyer of relationships and sower of discord?”

“Uh,” Keith says from entrance of the baths, dutifully staying right where he was commanded to stay still. “No?”

“Damn,” Lance breathes. “It’s a like a whole new possibility of pain and torment. We have got to tell Pidge. She’ll destroy us all.”

“What’s monopoly?” Allura asks from the safety of her distant corner of the baths.

“Oh, this is just too good,” Lance says. “This is like all my Christmases come at once.”

Allura badly wants to ask what a christmas is, but gets the sense that idea would be even more difficult to explain. And besides, the fact that she’s now got two of her paladins in the baths while she wears not a single stitch of clothing steals her voice through the sheer weight of burning embarrassment.

“Allura, princess of my heart and soul, could you, uh, turn around please?” Lance asks, pleading sliding into his voice like a thief in the night. 

Allura wants to ask how he knows she’s not turned to the far wall but doesn’t actually want that answer. She shifts until she’s safely staring at the curved walls of the bath, steam leaving beaded trails of moisture. “I’ve turned around,” she says and wills her voice not shake.

“Thanks,” Lance calls and she listens to the water splash as he hauls himself out of the water.

“Why are you naked?!” Keith yelps.

“Dude, do you take baths clothed?” Lance asks, tone amused and teasing. “I mean, I knew you were weird, but I didn’t think that you were _that_ weird.”

“What? No, I don’t, but,” Keith sputters in apparent shock. “Allura’s in here too, and—”

“And we’re leaving, the both of us,” Lance says firmly. “Hup-hup, mullet, time to pretend like we were never here and leave the princess to her beauty routine. Not,” Lance calls, his voice ringing across the tiles. “That you need it, Princess, but everyone should take time to pamper themselves. Not all of us are made of spite, an obsession with training, and mullets.”

“I don’t have an obsession with training,” Keith protests. 

“But you do admit that you have a mullet?” Lance crows. “I knew you’d see the light eventually. Say goodbye to Allura because out we go.”

“Lance,” Allura can hear the whine slide into Keith’s voice and spares a moment of pity for him.

“Nope, nope, out we go. One foot in front of the other, I know you know how to do this,” Lance cajoles, voice light and easy and Allura wonders when she started being able to tell the difference between Lance teasing because he felt playful and Lance using humor as a shield, as mask to hide behind.

“Well,” Keith responds, voice gone caustic and dry. “If we’re going out into the hallway, you at the very least need pants.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

///

The great network of libraries and archives hidden in the depths of the castle were not a place Allura often found herself. Any text she needed or wanted could easily be transferred to her personal datapad. Any archive accessed through network with a word. The arching shelves laden with books, ancient datapads filled with forgotten information, old and stuttering search programs running on fumbling loops were a realm as foreign to her as the long dead Daibazaal. But she found herself wandering their winding stacks, fingers trailing along the spines of books forgotten to even the most dedicated of librarians.

If pressed Allura knows she’d have no good answer for why she paces the library at the castle’s heart. She’s not even sure she knows why the castle even has one, given how redundant it is in the face of the castle’s massive computational power. When she’d asked, so long ago it defies her comprehension (10,000 years, how does anyone make sense of being asleep for so long?), her father had given her a soft, sad sort of smile and said it was for a friend. One he’d hoped would come back to herself one day.

Allura never asked that question again. Or any other about the library.

Just walking along the shelves left her swamped with a strange feeling of nostalgia and an aching wondering of what could have been, given tiny differences of events:

if her father had loved Zarkon just a little less;

if Zarkon had loved his wife just a little less;

if Haggar had been a little less obsessed;

such small things for such enormous events, she thinks. Such tiny degrees of intensity for such mighty deaths.

She blows out an unsteady breath, tries to think along different paths—less of what could have been and more about what is and could be. They don’t have the time, she tells herself firmly, for the luxury of what could have been. 

In the depths of her thoughts and longing Allura all but falls over Lance where he lounges sprawled in the narrow space between two shelves, seemingly engrossed in massive text that covers his entire lap. He blinks up at her, as startled as she, and then—in a move so quick it seems unreal—he snaps closed the book and shoves it underneath his butt. She blinks at him and he gives her an uncertain smile in response.

“Yo, Princess,” he says, and there’s a note in his voice that she’s long since learned to interpret as ‘Lance making trouble.’ She eyes him suspiciously and he smiles with all the innocence he can conjure. “What’s up?”

Allura blinks, finds herself thoroughly derailed. Points to the ceiling and says the obvious. “The ceiling?”

Lance blinks at her a couple of times, chews on his lips as an odd sputter escapes him before he drops his head in his hands and gives into the cackles. “Nah, man, nah,” he sighs between giggles. “It’s, like, a way of asking what you are doing.”

She frowns, trying to work out the etymology and finding herself completely baffled. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah,” Lance sighs, leans back against the shelves and grins at her from his sprawling seat on the ground. “English is like that.”

They stare at each other for a moment, silence twisting and pulling between them, awkward and strange as they both remember the last time they were alone in a presumably forgotten part of the castle. She can see him remember it in the way a flush crawls across the tops of his ears, over the fine arch of his nose. And she wonders for a moment if the lingering embarrassment has written itself over her own features.

Then she wedges the toes of one foot underneath Lance and tries to shift him off the book he’s still trying to hide. “What were you reading?”

Lance yelps, clings to the book with both hands as she threatens to unbalance him from his perch. “Nothing!”

“If it was nothing,” she says reasonably—amused despite herself with the way he pouts up at her, all big eyes and wounded feelings, “you wouldn’t mind showing it to me.”

“Fine,” he huffs, slides his weight to one side to pull the massive tome from underneath himself. “No laughing at me.”

Allura slides to sit next to him, fingers smoothing over the pocked and notched cover of the book, feels tears prickle at the corners of her eyes—tight and hot. “Why would I laugh at you about this?”

“Cause it’s, like, children’s stories?” Lance replies. She hears rather than sees his reaction to the tears that spill unwanted and humiliating over her cheeks. “Ah, Princess, don’t cry.”

“My mother used to read this to me,” she murmurs, fingers still drifting over the cover as if drawn there like magnets. “I thought it lost.”

Lance drags her into his arms and she thinks faintly that she should protest, but the shock of seeing the book, pressure of haunting memories and nostalgic longing, has her collapsing into his embrace as if all her bones had suddenly turned to liquid. He fits an arm along her back, pulls her tight to him in an awkward hug, and she can feel the press of lips to her hair. “It’s a lot,” he says quiet, somehow finding words for the emotions that drown her any time she’s left alone with only her thoughts to accompany her. “It’s okay for it to be a lot.”

She shifts, presses her face to the hollow of his neck, and lets him hold her softly as her shoulders shudder and heave. Lets him press soft kisses to the crown of her head, comb long fingers through her hair, and cradle her as if she were made of glass and fragmenting crystal—delicate and shattering. Breathes in the smell of soap, the moisturizer he’d gotten her to translate, and the faint tang of sweat. Uses his heartbeat to settle her own. And wonders, not for the first time and perhaps not for the last, when it became Lance who managed to pry her out of her protective armour of distance and command.

“Sorry,” she murmurs, tries to pull away until Lance’s arms tighten, fingers pressing firmly against the back of her head, leaving her pinned to his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” he says, shifts to pull her fully into his lap. She knows she should resist, pull away and put distance between them—keep things careful and controlled—but somehow that knowledge seems irrelevant, a faint thought for another time. So she goes as he tugs her, rearranges her so she settles comfortably. “This has been a long time coming.”

She breathes out, a ragged sigh, wet and trembling with the lingering tears. “Perhaps,” she agrees breathlessly, lungs still burning with her weeping. “But I should—mmgh!”

Lance tightens his grip until the air is crushed out of her. “Shoulds and emotions don’t go well together, Princess,” he scolds gently. “Don’t go down that road.”

Allura counts to ten inside her head, imagines a part of her body relaxing with each number, and goes limp in his arms. In response he relaxes until they are a loose pile of limbs sprawled between the darkened and echoing stacks of the castle’s neglected library. She cradles the book of fairytales between them and lets herself float—wrung dry and left shuddering from the sudden storm of emotions. She feels as if all her thoughts were far away, on the other side of a wormhole, and too vague to plague her. 

She strokes idly fingers along the spine of the book, its mass taking up her entire lap much the way she takes up Lance’s. Allura know she should feel guilty about that, or at least embarrassed, but no flush of shame comes at the thought, only mild and exhausted acceptance. She simply hasn’t the energy to behave the way she ought, so she acts as she wants. 

“What stories did you read?” She asks, voice so quiet and low she’s not sure he even hears her when he sits quiet and still underneath her weight.

“Honestly,” Lance responds—voice whisper soft and sharing. “I’m not sure? Something about a bird who turns into a woman when killed and a stranger who tells a king to go somewhere no one knows and get something no one knows?”

Allura laughs to hear the story so mangled, dragged ungently through rough translations and human interpretation of Altean culture. “Go Where I Know Not and Fetch What I Know Not,” she mumbles against his collarbones, tilts her head to breath more easily against his shoulder. “It’s an old story. Not a pretty one.”

“Read it to me?” He asks, shameless as any child.

She knows she should demure. That she should stand quiet and proud and set them both back at their places as Princess and Paladin. But she does not. Can do no such thing. Finds herself seduced by the uncertain light of the library, the faint murmur of the castle’s electronic breath, and Lance’s steady heartbeat under her cheek. “Alright,” she sighs, ignores the way her breath against his slender neck sends a shiver across every part of him. “As you wish.”

Lance laughs softly, limbs tremble underneath her in an uncertain rhythm. “Man, Princess. You shouldn’t say that,” he says and laughs again—quiet and wry, “I’ll tell you why some other time.”

She hums a faint assent. “Do you still want me to read it?”

“Sure,” he agrees, pleads, sighs against her hair so she more feels his words than hears them. “Turn off the translation program. Make me work for it.”

Allura laughs at that from the gentle cage of his arms. Shifts little to drag the book across her knees so they can both see it, if Lance looks down. Dismisses the translation program that filters ever word, every thought, as easily as breathing between them. Pulls open the book and finds the page on muscle memory that astounds her. Fingers shiver at the little stick figures scribbled in the margins of the page. 

Lance catches her hand where it trembles over the page like a frightened bird, presses them down over the page, drags her fingertips across the crude drawings. 

“You drew these?” He asks so carefully she wonders at the delicacy of his tone.

Allura nods against his shoulder. “Yes,” she whispers her answer against hollow his throat, watches him shiver as her breath ghosts over his skin. “I got bored easily.”

“That’s adorable,” he says and she can see the edges of his grin. “I can just see tiny Allura defacing castle property.”

“It’s my castle,” she grumbles, then laughs when Lance jostles her with his knees, bouncing her against his chest.

“I was promised a story,” he pouts.

“Spoiled,” she teases, settles herself more comfortably against Lance’s chest. Just for a moment, she tells herself. She’s steal his warmth for just a moment.

Lance laughs, clear and delighted. “Totally. You aren’t the only princess here. Story?”

Lulled by the creeping shadows of the library—lights slowly turning themselves off as they no longer detect movement through their ancient passages—and the growing silence punctuated by only by their whispering voices and the low hum of the castle’s ever-present electronics, Allura slides her fingers over the words, reading them as much from memory as from the page itself.

“В некотором государстве жил-был царь, холост — не женат. Был у него на службе стрелок по имени Андрей….” 

Tells the story the way her mother told her, the way her grandmother told it. Tells the story of the hunter who captured a beautiful bird that turned into a lovely woman and how together they trick an evil king, his scheming steward, and find themselves at every turn more deeply in love. Reads the story as if sharing old secrets—hushed and careful, her voice a lulling tide. 

She feels Lance slowly fall into easy sleep, body going lax and warm around her—cheek pressed to the top of her head, arms loose around her, hands limp against her hips. Listens to his steady breathing—in and out as certain as electromagnetic waves from a new star. Feels herself slowly slip into the same waiting darkness, dragged there by the simple comfort of another’s breath in her hair, warmth at her back.

Allura lets her fingers still against the page, turns her cheek to his chest, and thinks just for a moment, just for a breath.

Just a little bit.

Only a little.

And between one thought and the next she drifts.

When Coran finds them, hours later, a tangled sprawl of limbs spilled between two towering bookshelves, he says not a word. Helps them stand as their bodies protest their long nap in awkward positions. Hands the book to Allura and doesn’t even quirk an eyebrow when Lance presses it back into her hands when she tries to give it to him. 

“Later,” he says quietly, a promise between them.

Coran makes no comment, no subtle rebuke. Doesn’t even shake his head, merely motions them on, gently directing them to their beds.

If their fingers tangle together, easy and sweet, well, he says nothing about that either.

///

The days spill forward and Allura feels as if they are rushing to some unknown point. Every time she finds Lance hiding in neglected, forgotten parts of the castle it feels like something secret, something stolen from its natural order, and she can’t help but wonder what will happen when everything goes back to normal. Longing and anxiety make themselves at home in her chest every day that Keith shakes off a little bit more of the tomusqua’s neurotoxin. Watches herself steal glances at Lance—finds them returned with an expression she can’t interpret—as Keith regains himself.

Soon, she thinks to herself, soon he’ll be back to normal and no longer driving Lance to secret, hidden places to avoid his false affections. She feels small, and petty, and selfish when she hopes for another day, another week, a few moments longer—willing to trade Keith’s misery and confusion for stolen moments with Lance. Hates herself, more than a little, for that.

Knows Keith can feel it across Voltron’s bond when they fight Hagar’s newest abomination, Zarkon’s latest bid for control, Lotor’s most recent gambit. She shrinks from his questioning frown, shakes off his hand, ignores his awkward question. Feels low, lower, lowest as she adds a new point of stress to his already turbulent situation. Finds herself avoiding both Keith and Shiro as adroitly as Lance out of guilt and creeping shame.

Allura slides away from their twin looks of concern, dodges their respectful requests that she come discuss new plans, strategies, tactics with a faint smile and words she can’t remember as soon as they leave her lips. Abuses her position as princess, as de facto-commander, to put off their justifiable worry. 

She just can’t find the force of will to look Keith in the eyes knowing in her heart of hearts she’d let him linger in discomfort and confusion if it would give her a little longer to use him as an excuse to steal quiet moments with Lance. And she loathes how juvenile and petty she’s been reduced to. So much, she thinks only a little bitter, for the idea that love makes one better.

Oh no.

Oh no no nononono

She needs a drink. Perhaps many drinks. As many as it takes to blot that terrible thought from her mind. Because as soon as she thinks the word it sinks hooks in her heart as sure and tearing as any fisherman’s line. Of all the things, she berates herself, that the team does not need, her sudden and foolish feelings were certainly on the top of that list. Of all the things _Lance_ did not need, her tortured and fragmented heart was certainly at the top of it. A friend, a confidante, a solid foundation, yes. 

Not … whatever melodramatic nonsense her heart had worked itself into. 

Allura swears quietly at herself—vexed and exhausted—as she pushes her way into the tiny NCO lounge hidden behind Blue’s massive hanger. Forgotten even by Coran, she was certain, because it still had _uisce beatha_ stocked in heavy bottles. She’s certain that it was he that went through every other lounge, hall, and recreation facility that could potentially hold any intoxicant. 

Generally she can’t stand the hard burn of the liquid down the back of her throat. Loathes the way it makes her thoughts slow and distant. But it seems somehow fitting today to find solace in questionable life choices as loathe as she is normally is to indulge in such potentially self-destructive coping mechanisms. It seems … the done thing when it comes to an aching heart and a poor sense of self-preservation. 

She’s read enough romance novels. 

She knows the tropes. 

She cares not at all if she falls into them.

Allura pushes the doors into the shabby little lounge open with a sigh that rattles her to her core. Drags up and out of her throat like air pushed from a smith’s bellows, all heaving sound and useless air.

“Someone’s having a bad day,” Lance comments idly from where he slumps, boneless and bleary at the corner of one battered couch. “Want a drink?” he asks, waves a glass at her to make the ice clink in it quietly like the chiming of winter bells. “I don’t know what the hell this is, but it kicks like an enraged llama.”

Allura doesn’t know what a llama is, has learned not to ask such questions, and catches the glass from Lance’s long-fingered grasp. She sniffs it delicately, eyes watering, and the sound she makes is high and distressed—like the sound of some small, started prey animal. She hands back the glass with a look of disgust she can’t disguise. “That is some form of ryncol. It can also be used as crude fuel in a pinch.”

Lance studies his glass with wide, impressed eyes. “God damn,” he breathes. “I knew this shit would fuck you up but that’s a whole new level of terrible.”

“Why are you drinking it,” she asks, baffled yet again, “if you don’t like the taste?”

“The point, Princess of my heart and soul,” Lance says, slurs only a little if she’s listening for it. “Is not for it to taste good. The point is to forget.”

She moves behind the bar, grabs two glasses and considers her options, because no way could she leave him to drink ryncol. It’s probably actively corrosive to human bodies. “Forget what?” she asks distantly, mind already taken up with determining proportions and ideally not setting herself on fire. “Keith?” 

Lance hauls himself up the couch so he can drape his arms along the back and eye her speculatively. “Oh god,” Lance spits bitterly. “Not you, too. I am not into Keith.”

Allura blinks. “I’m sorry, but, what?”

Lance stares at her for a moment and then laughs lowly. “Man, we really do need to do something about the slang translation on the ship,” he comments more to himself than her. His gaze, when he lifts his eyes back to hers, is heavy with an emotion, an intensity, she can’t name. “I am not interested in forming a relationship with Keith.”

Allura ignores her heart’s traitorous, hopeful skip at that. She’d known, of course she’d known, that Lance is uninterested, but something low and small in her heart pulls painfully at the confession. “I didn’t think you did?

Lance wrinkles his nose, takes a long pull from his glass and makes an even more pronounced face. “That’s good,” he breathes around what she knows is a furious burn of the ryncol. “You’d be the only one.”

She makes a face as he takes another swallow of the pale gold liquid. “You’ll go blind drinking that,” she warns him. 

Lance hiccups lightly into his fist. “That’s what my mama used to say about me touching myself and not blind yet.”

Allura gives him a long look over a bottle of what she hopes is _rhum agricole._ “I’m not sure I want an explanation as to what that means.”

Lance waggles his eyebrows at her. “I could give y--,” his voice abruptly cuts off and Allura watches with mute fascination as a flush climbs up his face and over his nose. “You know what, nope. No. Gonna shut myself up right there.”

“I wasn’t sure you knew how to do that,” she comments dryly. Pours a pair of simple caipirinhas and moves back around the bar to slide onto the couch while Lance struggles to find a retort. Plucks the glass from his fingers. “Trade you.”

“Well,” Lance says slowly, drawing out the vowel, and taking the offered drink from her with lingering fingers. “You could always give me something else to do with my mouth.”

They sit and stare at each other for a long moment. She blinks at him and Lance manages to go three shades darker than his lion. Allura can’t help it. She sputters a laugh at him, curling around her glass and cackling like a particularly demented corvid. 

Lance heaves a sigh, tilts his face up to stare at the ceiling. “Can we just pretend I didn’t say that? It’s the booze talking.”

Allura chews on her lip, fights to keep from asking: ‘what if I don’t want to?’ Because that is not a thing a friend should say. That would only make everything so much worse. Last thing any of part of this situation needs is more hormones and rash decisions. She grabs ahold of the part of her that wants, badly, to find out what Lance would do if anything actually came of his flirty comments and shoves it in a box. Instead she crooks an eyebrow at him. “I’m impressed that you can say anything after all the ryncol you were drinking.”

Lance glances the half empty glass and grimaces. “I wish I could blame the, what was it? Ryncol? But no, I only had like half a two-finger glass.”

Allura cocks her head at him, tries to work out that measurement system and then blows at her fair in frustration. “Please tell me this unit of measurement does not work the way that I think it works.”

That gets her a low laugh. “Nah, Princess, we don’t use severed fingers or something to measure booze. Look,” Lance takes the glass of ryncol and wraps his hand around it, middle finger flush with the base and middle tucked tight to it, “if you have more alcohol than your first finger from the bottom then you have a ‘finger of alcohol.’ If it’s up above the second finger –”

“Then it’s two fingers of alcohol,” she finishes. “Yes, I understand. What an unnecessarily complicated system of measurement.”

Lance shrugs. “Welcome to drinking culture on Earth. Unnecessarily complicated, weirdly ritualistic, and prone to bad life choices.”

She watches as he delicately sips the drink she’d given him and grins when he lights up. “Better than ryncol?”

“Holy shit, yeah!” comes the enthusiastic reply. “What is this?”

Allura laughs and swirls her own drink idly, lets herself sink slowly into the couch, each muscle releasing their little hoards of stress and unhappiness as the alcohol crept through her bloodstream like a seeping poison, stealing not only her stress but her good sense. It is the only reason she can give for why she lolls her head along the edge of the couch to regard Lance through her eyelashes. “And why should I give away my secrets?”

She can feel the smile unfurl across her face as Lance goes very still beside her, turn to regard her slowly the way one might a large and dangerous predator that has just made itself known. She watches his slow swallow and the way he cocks his head to the side, regarding her with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. She regrets, a little, the low-light of the lounge that leeches the colour from his eyes, leaving them dark and shaded with a slowly igniting intensity. “Careful, Princess,” he near whispers, voice gone rough as the sea on a lightening laced night. “You can give a guy false impressions, saying things like that.”

“False?” She echoes as softly, startled by her voice’s husky purr. “Are you certain of that?”

She sips her drink carefully as Lance breathes out slowly. Allura can almost hear him counting out the breath, it’s so slow and controlled as it rattles out of him. Watches as he drags a hand through his hair. The translation program refuses to provide even the faintest outline of the obvious obscenities that fall from his lips. She quirks a small smile at him when he opens his eyes, slow and careful to return her stare. 

His gaze, however, is finally bereft humor. Like a warrior deciding to forsake his favorite shield, Lance refuses to make a joke, to deflect, to diffuse as the tension in the room to ratchets itself up into uncomfortable degrees. Locks eyes with her and is so serious that it hurts parts of her heart in ways she can’t describe. Feels guilty, in vague and distant ways, for stripping him of his natural defenses. It isn’t fair, she knows abstractly, to leave him without the refuge of jokes and sly innuendo. 

“Princess,” he starts, swallows hard and fixes his stare to the wall over her left shoulder. “Princess, I don’t think you mean what I want you to mean.”

She wants to ask what he wants her to mean. Wants to tease him for a little longer with sliding innuendo and a little bit of foolish innocence, the type that willfully refuses to see the cliff they are threatening to run off of. But she knows him too well now. Knows those kinds of games will eat a hole in him that he lacks the ability to patch. 

Allura blinks at him, slow and heavy, feels all her limbs move sluggish and slow as if through water, against a rushing current. She can see how his breath dies in his throat, closed off and choked, as she leverages herself up and off the couch. Watches as he stays so painfully, painfully still as she sways up onto her knees, hair spilling around her like some velveteen cloak.

Lance doesn’t even tremble as she catches herself on his shoulders, swinging one leg over his hips so she straddles him, staring down at him through the veil of her hair. Watches as his jaw works when he grinds his teeth, biting back whatever reaction, pithy phrase, desperate attempt at childish innuendo he’s drug up to defend his fragile emotions. Cocks her head to the side and feels the weight of her hair slide over her shoulder, across his chest, shield them from view like the Green Lion’s invisibility cloak.

Fits her hands to his jaw, slides her thumbs gentle and sure across the line of his cheeks. She feels him swallow hard and shuddering against her fingers, finds she likes him trapped and trembling underneath her. 

“Tell me no,” she whispers as she leans slowly forward, fitting herself into his spaces. “Tell me.”

Lance’s hands slide, slow and shaking, up her thighs where they spread across his lap, to settle light and delicate against her hips. She notes, faint and surprised, how broad those hands are, how his fingers wrap around the points of her hips to hold her steady and still. His eyes close against her nearness, breath a shuddering, broken thing against her lips.

But his gaze when he opens his eyes traps her as easily as electromagnetic cuffs. “I would never tell you no. About anything,” he sighs, voice at once resigned and longing. “You know that.”

“I know,” she agrees as easy as breathing—she’s always known somewhere on the edges of her consciousness that she probably owns alarming chunks of his heart. Finds herself glad of it. Catches him as he unravels with her words, drags him up against her lips—straining and eager—to slot him where he belongs. Presses her lips against his like she could brand him with the sheer passion of it. 

Slides her hands up into his hair to tangle her fingers at the silky strands grown long and uneven at his nape, and fists them hard, dragging his throat up for her to nip along. Comes back to swallow the ragged moans that tumble from his lips, unbidden and fractured. His hands spasm on her hips like he wants to drag her closer, but can’t quite find the courage. She laughs just a little against his lips and rolls her hips hard and demanding against his, swallows his jagged moan like it's something sweet and sliding down her throat. 

“Allura,” Lance sighs and her name across his lips is like a drug, thick and all encompassing. She makes a small, inquisitive noise against his lips and tightens her grip in his hair, forcing him to bow backward in her hands. “You don’t mean this.”

She shifts her grip a little, tightens her fists again to make him gasp and moan, and grins down at him, predatory and feral. “You think?” She purrs, grinds her hips down against his, making him shudder and buck without a thought. “I think I know my own mind, paladin.”

Lance swears against her lips, fervent and furious, fingers digging bruises against the delicate flesh around her hips. “There’s no way,” he breathes.

She bites him before he can finish that sentence. Sucks his bottom lip between her teeth and nips it warningly. Sighs out a breath as his hands sweep over her ass and kneads. Moans low and breathy when he scrapes his teeth lightly across her exposed collarbone. Shivers when he rears up to press light, butterfly kisses across her throat—so delicate they are more the faint ghosting of breath and pressure against her skin leaving her aching and desperate. 

Feels him shudder everywhere when she slides her hands under his shirt, rucking it up his chest as she sweeps her palms across soft skin over hard muscle. Smiles, sly and pleased with herself, when he blinks at her—pupils blown wide and dark as the space they hurtle through. Shifts herself in his lap just to feel him move with her, pull her slow and careful down to himself as if he expected at any moment to suddenly protest and pull away. 

Allura curls into him with a contended sigh, licks into his mouth to chase the lingering sweetness of the drink just to hear him groan. Gasps against the hollow of his throat when his fingers slip, cool and soft, under her loose shirt to trace the bottom of her ribs. Lance stares up at her as she pulls back from him, finds his hands on her ribs and guides them to cup her breasts. Presses them to her when his fingers tremble. “Yes,” she sighs into his kiss. “ _Yes._ ”

Lance spreads his hands across her breasts, slow and sure, and she has to catch herself on his shoulders when he rolls his thumbs over her nipples in easy circles. Her breath stutters and dies in her throat, when he leans forward, eyes locked on hers so dark it’s as if all light goes there to die, and bites lightly at them through her shirt. Finds herself helplessly pinned by his gaze and his sudden confidence as he explores her body with clever fingers and mouth. Shivers when he spreads one hand across the span of her back between her shoulder blades and presses her forward as he sucks delicate bruises into the skin below her collarbones. 

Grabs his hair and whines low in her throat, urging him lower—fumbles with one hand at the clasp of her shirt when she hears a noise like someone had both tried to whimper and yell at the same time and succeeded only in making a terrible, strangled shriek. As if pulled by an electromagnet current, she and Lance turn to stare at Keith, who flattens himself against the door—one fist pressed against his mouth, eyes so wide she swears she can almost see the whites all the way around them.

Lance groans and presses his forehead to her sternum while embarrassment paints her cheeks in flaming scarlet. She blinks at Keith as the room spins slightly—the alcohol in her system making itself known once again—and notes that he has trouble looking anywhere but at them.

“Your timing, mullet, is _amazing_ as always,” Lance grumbles against her chest, and she pets his hair absently, her gaze never leaving Keith, who—for his distinctly traumatized part—watches them both with an expression she can’t quite read.

“I. Uh. I didn’t,” Keith’s voice breaks and he looks up at the ceiling as if he’ll find the answers to his obvious moment of existential crisis. “I’ll go?”

“You do that,” Lance replies with an impressively neutral tone. Keith look at her for a moment and she smiles at him—bemused, tipsy, and thoroughly unsure of what she should do in this situation. She untangles one hand from Lance’s hair and gives Keith a little finger wave good bye. 

Keith looks at them a heartbeat longer, makes a low choked noise in his throat, and flees the room. 

Allura can feel the groan drag itself through Lance as he presses his forehead a little harder to her chest. She pets him gently, fingers carding through his hair—notes the way it gently curls a little at the end. “Your hair is getting long,” she notes absently, words tripping out her mouth as the idea pops into her head. “How has it not gotten long before this?”

His laughter rattles through her like an electric current, sparking up her spine and through her heart leaving her giddy and restless. “Man, Princess, you are smashed,” he says, pulls back from her with a complicated smile pulling at his lips. “Maybe it’s a good thing that Keith interrupted.”

The look on her face hurts the corners of her heart, like a vice squeezing down on it, trapped and tender. She smooths her fingers along his cheeks and croons in wordless concern. He sighs, eyes fluttering shut at her touch. She takes that as an acceptance, as assent, and traces the line of his jaw, slides the very tips of her fingers over his brow, ghosts down his cheekbones. Learns every line of his profile by touch so she could recognize it even blind, deaf and dumb. 

How long they sit in easy, slow exploration of each other she doesn’t know. Minutes trip by without their notice, paid as little heed as the first tinging of gold to late summer leaves. 

“Well,” Hunk says, eyeing them both in faintly exasperated amusement. “At least you guys aren’t naked.”

Lance makes an incoherent sound of offense and presses his forehead back against her sternum again as if he could hide between her breasts. She wraps her arms around his shoulders, hiding him from sight, and blinks slow and confused up at Hunk. Her thoughts feel vague and faraway like a shore only glimpsed distantly through shifting fog. “When did you arrive?” She asks, makes sure each word is carefully pronounced. “I’m not certain I noticed.”

“You two are definitely tipsy if not drunk,” Hunk tells her, ignoring her question entirely. She frowns up at him, a petulant feeling building low in the pit of her stomach. 

Lance tightens his grip around her waist and she blinks down at him when he pulls back enough to look at her amused and fond. “No yelling at Hunk.”

“I wasn’t yelling,” she responds, wondering how he had known that feeling was building. She looks up at Hunk. “I wasn’t going to yell. I don’t.”

She shifts in Lance’s lap as he pulls her down more securely, laughter shaking his shoulders. “You don’t,” he agrees and then taps his nose gently to hers, making her go slightly cross-eyed to watch him, when she narrows her eyes at him in suspicion. “You just get stern and disappointed.”

Allura giggles at him when he rubs his nose to hers again, feels all parts of her melt into his embrace and easy affection. “I like you,” she says, feels the words bubble up through her throat unbidden and uncontrolled. “I should have said that earlier.”

Lance runs his thumbs over her hips and the smile he gives her hurts, makes her think of slowly shattering glass. “I like you too,” he tells her quiet and sincere. “I like you too.”

Before she can ask what’s wrong, ask why the words to seem to drag out of him like knives from a wound, Hunk is gently pulling her up to standing. She makes a faint sound of protest low in her throat, distressed and confused, and tries to tighten her grip on Lance. “And now that we have gotten to ‘I love you, man’-o’clock it is time for everyone to go to bed,” Hunk tells her as he carefully works her fingers free from Lance’s hair. Sighs at her when she whines. “Tomorrow,” he says conversationally, as if they were talking over tea, “you are going to hurt so bad.”

She splutters at him in offense. “Shan’t,” she informs him archly, even as she has to catch herself on his shoulders. “Alteans process alcohol very efficiently.”

“Explains why she went from a little tipsy to completely smashed in the space of two drinks and, like, half an hour,” Lance comments from where he slouches boneless on the couch. He lifts one hand slow and careful. “Though it could be the booze? I don’t know, man. I’m not sure I can get up.”

Hunk looks between the two of them and sighs. “Why are you two like this?” He asks shaking his head. “Just. Why.”

Allura fists her hands in his vest to keep herself upright as the room spins alarmingly and cocks her head, feels the weight of the castle’s artificial gravity pull her to one side. Hunk heaves another sigh and catches her under one elbow. “Why are we like what?” She asks Hunk very seriously, sways in his arms like one half of a dance and Hunk looks at her as if he’s found a secret that he’ll never share. “What are we like?”

“A mess, that’s what,” Hunk tells her, the tartness of his tone tempered by a sweet, slightly crooked smile. “Can you walk?”

She splutters at him, offended on general principles, and shoves herself away from his chest and the comforting confines of his arms. She promptly overbalances from the force of her escape and the room tilts like child’s spinning top and the floor rushes up to meet her like a long-lost lover. Their potentially disastrous reunion is halted by Hunk’s arm around her waist and the room spins again as he hauls her upright with more strength than grace.

“That’s a no then,” he comments lightly. Thoroughly ignores her incoherent protests of indignity as he swings her feet off the ground and settles her in his arms with a sigh of long suffering. “Are you fit to get yourself back to your room, you nightmare collection of poor life choices?”

Allura grumbles from her cradle of Hunk’s arms—which are like steel bands around her—and Hunk jostles her until she fits her face in the hollow of his neck and squeeze her eyes tight against the upsetting movement of the world. Lance’s laugh makes her peek open one eye to peer at him through the curtain of her hair. He watches her with an expression twisted between tender fondness and a type of knife-slice self-depreciation. 

“No,” Lance replies when the laughter dies in his throat as if strangled by the weight of his evident frustration. “But I’ll get there. You tend to the princess.”

“I’ll help,” Keith’s shy, quiet voice slides between them like a knife between ribs and she notes distantly that Lance startles almost as badly as she does. “I can help get him to bed.”

“Taking advantage of my inebriated state?” Lance asks, and Allura isn’t certain who the mockery crouched over his tone like goblin of self-loathing, is for—Keith or himself. “You _fiend_.”

Keith doesn’t bother to respond to this, merely stares solemn and sober at Hunk. Because she’s watching Lance—because, she notes at herself faint and bemused, she is always watching Lance—she sees the way corners of his mouth twist before he blinks, slow and deliberate like an irate cat, and his expression smooths.

Allura can feel the sigh that drags through Hunk’s chest like a freight train, rattling them both with the force of his frustration. “Nah man,” he demures and Allura can see all parts of Keith deflate as he looks away. “I’ll come back and get him. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve put his drunk ass to bed.”

“Very sadly true,” Lance comments from where he manages to sprawl, boneless and strangely elegant, across the faded couch. “But, dude, if mullet here is ready and willing to finally take me to bed, then who am I to say no in the face such determination?”

Keith and Allura make similar noises of inarticulate protest and Lance cracks a lopsided grin at them. Keith glances at Allura and a faint blush climbs up his throat, paints his cheeks in the palest of pinks. “I’m just helping you to bed,” he protests, looking anywhere but at Lance who’s grin slowly turns wicked. “That’s all.”

“Oh,” Lance sing-songs, his voice a horrifying parody of a simpering debutant. “Mr. Kogane, _oh._ ”

“Lance,” Hunk says, exhaustion forcing his voice into flat monotone. 

“I’ll be good,” Lance replies, evidently cowed. “Scout’s honor.” And makes a hand gesture Allura is almost completely positive is rude. Hunk lowers his head until his chin is resting on the top of Allura’s head and she’s certain he’s giving Lance that long, steady stare where one eyebrow slowly raises to try to join his hairline in silent judgement. Lance moves his hands through a couple more gestures, all of them she is certain are at least impolite from the way Keith splutters. “I’m a good boy.”

Hunk sighs. “For variable definitions of ‘good’.”

Lance shrugs, his entire body a slouch of careless and heavy limbs. “I’ll take it,” he says before gesturing at Keith. “Come ‘ere, mullet. I lack necessary escape velocity to get off the couch.”

“I have a name,” Keith complains faintly, but cautiously approaches the couch as if sidling up to large, potentially dangerous predator with an uneven temper. “And what do you even mean about ‘escape velocity’? It doesn’t work that way.”

“And now we all have demonstrated by my inebriated ass why I will never be the star pilot,” Lance says with a false cheer that grates across Allura like steel wool and heated sand. “Thank you for that, Keith.”

“I didn’t,” Keith protests, frowns as words evidently fail him. “That’s not what I _meant_.”

“And yet,” Lance replies as he raises one hand languidly, arrogant as any king before a supplicant. “Here we find ourselves.”

“Lance.” Hunk sighs.

“I’m good. I’m good,” Lance defends, waves his hands in front of himself like a shield, as if he could wipe the offending words from the air between them. 

Allura untangles her fingers from the death hold that she has on Hunk’s vest, points at Lance as imperiously as she can manage from where she lays limp and cradled like a sleepy child against Hunk’s impossibly broad chest. “Behave,” she tells him. “Be good.”

“Well, shit,” Lance drawls, slow and amused. “Now that I’ve had a direct order from our fearless leader I’d better be.”

“Shiro is our leader,” Keith says, confusion writ across every line of him.

Lance laughs low and rumbling. “As the Princess would point out: it’s her castle and her lions. Pretty sure that means she’s the real leader.”

Keith turns to study her, all dark eyes and seriousness. She blinks back at him. “It is my castle,” she says, only a little petulant. “But the lions’ are no one’s but their own.”

That gets her a contemplative head tilt as Keith studies her as if he’d never seen her before. As if she was a particularly complex bit of mathematics to solve—she’s not sure she likes the scrutiny and squirms under its intensity. “That’s true,” Keith says after long consideration. Says it as if offering wisdom from on high. “Both of those things are true.”

“And on that fascinatingly philosophical tangent,” Lance says. “You can help me up.”

Hunk shifts Allura in his arms, resettling her weight against him as they watch Keith drag Lance up to standing and then catch him as he stumbles, legs as uncertain and trembling as a newborn artiodactyla. She coos in alarm, flings out one arm as if she could catch him, when he staggers and nearly slides to his knees. Keith shoots her an alarmed look and then slots himself under Lance’s arm, pressed to his side to steady him.

“Careful,” Keith murmurs. “One foot in front of the other.”

They all shuffle, uncoordinated and awkward, towards the door. Allura presses her face against Hunk’s shoulder where it meets his neck and refuses to watch their progress—the world moving in unsettling and upsetting ways, threatening the stability of her stomach. She tangles her fingers in his vest and if she whimpers—a quiet sound of distress, high and thready—Hunk graciously says nothing.

She focuses on her breathing, one long breath in and then held for the span of a few heartbeats before slowly released, as they make their slow and staggering way down the hallway. Lance’s increasingly frustrated and sarcastic commentary a counterpoint to her own distressed breathing. Keith’s voice a low murmur of awkward comfort and fumbling attempts to defuse whatever fury Lance is trying to work himself toward.

Allura presses her face to Hunk’s neck until she can feel each breath drag through his throat, the heavy bob of his adam’s apple, breathes in the smell of oil and ozone that seems sunk into Hunk’s skin overlaid by the sweet smell of baking spices. She wonders when this had become the scent of home and comfort for her. Lets herself be lulled into dozing by the minute swing and sway of Hunk’s arms as he carries her. Drifts mindless and content, luxuriating in the feeling of being perfectly safe, nothing can reach her within the safety of Hunk’s arms. 

She tells Hunk this and then squeaks softly when he tightens his grip around her until she feels the air press out of her in a rush. She pats his cheek with her fingers, worried and distressed, and he sighs, breath mussing her hair.

“I wish I could tell you that you should always feel safe, Princess,” Hunk says quietly and she notes suddenly that the rolling background patter of Keith and Lance bickering with each other had fade out, disappeared into other parts of the castle. She can’t really spare a thought for that, though, as Hunk continues to talk as he carries her up the long stairs to her room as easily as he would a favored stuffed toy. “But that’s not reasonable, what with the Galra and gods know what else. But you should feel safe here. I’m glad you’re starting to talk to us more. Talking to Lance more.”

Allura rubs her cheek against Hunk’s shoulder for the simple comfort of it as she turns his words over in her head. The alcohol fading, losing its numbing grip on her thoughts, leaving her wrung dry and dazed. “I like him,” she whispers into Hunk’s vest. “Probably more than I should.”

“Shoulds and emotions don’t go together, Princess,” Hunk rebukes her gently.

She hears the echo of Lance in the words and laughs breathlessly. “Lance told me that once.”

“Did he?” Hunk murmurs as he hip checks open her door. “Nice to know some of what I tell him gets through that thick head of his.”

Allura hums an agreement, sleep clawing up her system—threatening to drag her down into blankness and silence at any moment. Hunk tumbles her into bed, gentle and amused at her graceless sprawl. They ponder together the hopeless snarl of her bootlaces and wonder how she’d managed to make such a mess of them, before Hunk helps her get them off. She’s endlessly grateful—tells him so and earns herself another soft, sad smile—when he sits with her while she slowly drifts into the still and the dark of sleep. Hunk’s hand moving gently through her hair and his deep voice a gentle hum.

When she wakes to the castle’s morning lights her boots sit neat and orderly by her door and a bottle of water on her vanity by her brushes. Wonders precisely what any of them did to deserve Hunk Garrett.

///

There are very few places that Allura has mentally banned herself from entering just for the sake of her own sanity (or to give the paladin’s their own spaces where they need not worry that the person nominally commanding them will intrude upon, but she’s increasingly found them dragging her into them under the guise of ‘team bonding’ despite her best efforts), but the holodeck that once housed her father’s AI was one of them. Nothing good came of her lurking about the still and silent room, odd in its darkness—lit only with the faint remnants of power tracing what would have been projection lines for the vast and dazzling holoprojections that rivaled reality. 

The room echoes queerly, her footsteps bouncing back to her in triplicate, making her sound like a legion striding across the room to the shattered core that once held her father’s electronic ghost. She stares down at it, her emotions a firestorm under her skin, a maelstrom in her mind—leaving her breathless and shuddering.

“I hate you so much,” she whispers to jagged edges of the crystalline core, runs her fingers over the knife sharp fractures. Raises her fingertips to eye level to watch the blood bubble up from hairline cuts across them—pain tiny and sharp. “You _left me._ Gave me nothing but fractured memories, half a hope, and five lions as traumatized as I am and you expected me to solve the problem you created because you couldn’t just see what he had become.”

Allura lets herself slide to her knees, drags bloody fingers over the tiny cracks of what remained of the curved dome of the AI casing. She knows she’s being melodramatic, foolish, but can’t bring herself to stop—can’t seem to yank her rampaging emotions back into the boxes where they belong. Loneliness and pain are feral beasts in her breast, eating out her heart and leaving her as raw and bleeding as her fingers.

“An AI with half your memories and a fraction of your personality was supposed to be sufficient?” She asks to the empty air. “That was supposed to guide me? I haven’t even gone through my Rite of Passage and you left me with the entire universe to save after _you_ helped release this monster on it? I hate you _so much._ ”

She curls around the fragmented remains of the casing and draws random lines across its fractured surface with the blood that slowly seeps from her fingers. She knows she’s being excessive and morbid and wasting precious time that they can scarce afford with her temper tantrum, but at the same time can’t stop the emotions that seep out of her like pus from an infected wound. Pulls herself into a tight ball at the base of her father’s last tomb and sobs like a lost child. Wails the high and wavering call of a child for guardian that’s never coming back.

“Why did you _leave me?_ ” The question rips out her throat like torrent, a rattling scream of despair and rage that pours out of her like poison.

Allura stiffens in shock, every muscle locking as if hit by Blue’s freeze ray, when gentle hands pull her away the dark and silent AI core—dead as its last inhabitant, dead until the ends of time—and cradles her face. “Hey,” Lance whispers, half smile wry and uncertain even as his hands cup her cheeks warm and sure and centering like nothing else. She trembles between them, wildly mortified and desperately craving his touch. “I don’t think you should be here.”

“I hate this place,” she whispers back like a confession, like a secret at a grave.

His thumbs move across her cheekbones in slow sweeps, methodically brushing away the tears that leave salty tracks across her face. “I kinda picked up on that,” he says as soft as the first bonds of hydrogen and helium, as momentous as that gentle beginning of star dust. “Just a little bit.”

She laughs, a wet and shaking sound that has him making a soft, pained expression. “I’m normally more together than this. I’m sorry.”

Lance sticks his tongue out at her and makes a ludicrous face that has her dissolving in hiccupping, helpless giggles. “Don’t apologize for having feelings. You are allowed to have feelings and express them.”

Allura smiles a little helplessly at him, caught by a sudden swelling tide of affection. “Did Hunk tell you that?”

He sighs, shoulders slumping dramatically. “Don’t tell him, but if I ever say anything wise and, like, fucking meaningful it probably came from Hunk.”

She pokes him in the ribs, slowly finding her equilibrium in their easy back and forth. Finds her way back to herself in his careful, gentle playfulness. “You say wise and meaningful things,” she chides softly, content to sit suspended between his hands as his fingers trace meandering paths over her jaw. “It’s not all just Hunk.”

“It’s mostly Hunk,” Lance replies, easy and sure. “He’s a thoughtful dude.”

And that’s a thing she can’t argue. Hunk and all his thoughtful grace was an unlooked for gift. The universe’s apology, she thinks a little hysterically, for all the horribleness that her life had become. All her paladins are. Each of them a gift in different ways—each a thing she desperately needs even without knowing it. The only things keeping her sane in the vast, pressing need of the universe.

Something of her thought must have shown across her face, because Lance frowns at her—soft and concerned in ways she knows she doesn’t deserve. He flicks her nose with one finger. “What’s that thought, Princess?” he asks gently, like she’d startle at the simplest of things. “What’s going on in there?”

She blows at a loose lock and chews on her bottom lip, unsure how to wrap the odd protective and grateful feeling into words. How to string together the sweeping emotion into something that could be constrained by grammar and the demands of language. “I’m glad it was you,” she says—knows it to be an echo of his own words as soon as surprise registers across his face. “I’m glad it was you that woke me.”

Allura almost laughs at the thoughts she can see spill across his face like ink from a tipped quill, as fast as lightning. And then the breath is stolen from her when he goes still and serious. The shield of his mirth dropped from him like deadweight to the bottom of the sea. “Yeah?” He breathes and she shivers as his breath ghosts across her skin—not sure she feels it or just imagines it, warm and smelling of Hunk’s dessert concoctions. “I wonder sometimes.”

She stares at him for a long moment, until he shuffles and squirms under her scrutiny. She studies the flush that climbs along his high cheekbones, the twist of his expressive mouth, the way his gaze shifts from hers—and finds in the summation of all these parts an answer to a question she’d never thought to ask. Slides her hands up his shoulders until they fist in his dark hair. An echo of that night when all her inhibitions and doubts had been put on hold.

Smiles when he stares and shivers at her, pupils dilating until they eat his irises, turning all that perfect blue into inky darkness of want and desire. Pulls him to her and sighs when he comes without even a whisper of protest. Fits her lips to his, nips his bottom lip and runs a gentle tongue along the line of pain when he whimpers sweet and low. 

When she pulls back she cocks her head slow and pleased at his dazed expression. “You shouldn’t doubt,” she tells him. Lies without thinking. “I don’t.”

Lance laughs, closes his eyes even as she uses her hold on his hair to tip his face up to press biting kiss along his jaw. “Not that I don’t love random make-outs,” he says, voice stuttering under the weight of emotions she can only guess at. “But I’d rather not go all Mary Shelley about it.”

“Mary Shelley?” She queries, bemused but quietly delighted at the way it makes his entire face light up. Lets him haul her to her feet with firm hands around her wrists, sliding under her elbows to steady her.

“Yeah!” Lance replies, enthusiasm and innocent joy infusing his tone. “She’s, like, my favorite author. I mean, she died centuries ago, but she wrote a lot of creepy ass shit and was the creator of science fiction—which is, don’t let anyone tell you any different, like a solid ninety percent of why any of us joined the Galaxy Garrison. Well,” Lance muses as he gently herds her out of the still and dead holodeck with its ghosts and seeping misery. “Maybe not Keith, because I’m not sure that dude has picked up a fiction novel that wasn’t assigned for class ever, but definitely Hunk though he’ll get all hard science-y about it if you call him out about it.”

“Hard science?” She repeats, mystified by the very concept. “Opposed to what? Gentle science? Science that goes squish?”

Lance blinks at her, slow and bemused. “Soft, generally speaking.”

Allura cocks her head to the side as she lets him unsubtly herd her out the door. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she complains. “How does that even begin to make sense?”

“It doesn’t,” Lance agrees laughing. “It’s just something people say.”

Allura rolls her eyes at him, and files it under one of the many, many things to make Pidge explain to her later. “You didn’t explain the comment about Mary Shelley either.”

“Oh, uh,” Lance stutters for a moment, fumbles a step, and Allura watches with amused fascination as a flush climbs up to the tips of his ears. “She, uh,” he coughs slightly before regaining himself, slides into a lecturing tone. “I mean, it’s more, like, apocryphal than actually confirmed, you know? But, uh, supposedly she lost her virginity on her mother’s grave.”

Allura considers this as he tugs her down the hallway, away from the place that could be—if one was being particularly maudlin (and she _was_ ) her own father’s grave—and knows herself to be a terrible person because she opens her mouth and asks as sweetly as she knows how: “But how can she ‘lose’ her virginity? Did she misplace it?”

Lance stumbles and when he turns to look at her—eyes narrowed and suspicious—she gives him the sweetest smile she can draw up. “You’ve been spending too much time with Pidge,” he says, voice pitched at a whine, but a smile lurks at the corner of his mouth. “Now you’re just fucking with me.”

“Well, we could just b—mmph.” She blinks at him when he slaps a hand over her mouth, his face an alarmingly ruddy under his dark skin. 

“Nope, no, nope, not letting you finish that sentence for my sanity, oh my god,” he says—babbles really, words tripping over themselves as they spill out his mouth like their sheer numbers will erase the suggestion that floats in the air between them. “Definitely a bad idea, that, when you are emotionally compromised and oh holy shit no.”

Allura can feel her eyes crinkle as a grin spreads across her face, delighted and predatory. She licks his hand, slow and teasing, just to watch him swallow hard and snatch his hand back. She shifts her weight to hip and cocks her head to the side. “You are surprisingly sweet.”

“And you are surprisingly evil,” he retorts, hand cradled to his chest as he eyes with desire and trepidation warring in his eyes. “I’m trying to be good.”

“And what if I don’t want you to be?” She asks, half a sly suggestion and half honest curiosity. She’s not actually surprised by his carefulness, his gentleness, but she wonders at the limits of it. 

She watches with a smug smile curling across her face like a cat that’s gotten its way—self-satisfied and preening—when his eyes dilate and narrow. He scrubs his face with one hand and sighs. “Princess,” and she frowns at the title, the return of that semi-respectful distance. “I have, like, zero fucking ground to stand on here, but this thing you are doing? The using physical intimacy to avoid feelings thing? It’ll rip you apart eventually.”

Allura can feel her expression fall like castle walls, sudden and shattering. “Is that a bit of wisdom from Hunk?”

Lance’s laugh is as bitter as her tone. “Nope, experience is a bitch of a teacher, but you do learn.”

Allura blinks at him, her building resentment and frustration blown away like fog by a incoming storm. “Oh. I’m sorry,” she looks away, folds her arms against herself. “I didn’t mean for it to be like that.”

“I know,” his voice is gentle—unbearably so, the type of gentleness that only comes when carefully correcting someone at great cost to one’s self.

She takes in his rueful half-smile, his careful distance and thinks to herself ‘ah-hah.’ Because of course his insecurities would wrap themselves around this in such insidious and devious ways. Before he can say more, talk himself into self-sacrificing idiocy, she wraps one fist around his collar and yanks him flush against her. Stares him down until whatever defensive babble that bubbles up to guard his heart dies stillborn in his mouth. 

“I like you,” she says with perfect diction—careful enunciation of each word. “I may even love you. No shut up,” she says with painful gentleness—tender sternness flooding each molecule of her. In this she will not be gainsaid or questioned—not by him and certainly not by his insecurities masquerading as thoughtfulness. “I am almost certainly the biggest emotional mess in any three star systems you care to name, but I know that much. If you want to keep your distance because of that, I completely understand. But know I know what I am about, Lance Espinosa, and I know my own mind when it comes to you.”

Lance stares at her for a long moment before swallowing hard. “That was, hands down, the most aggressive confession I have received,” he says in a daze as if she’d walked up and hit him with a piece of gird-iron. “Goddamn.”

“How is this for aggressive,” she tells him. “If you try to tell me that I don’t actually like you, that I don’t actually love you, because I am grieving and just latching onto you I will have Blue sit on you and let you feel every single thing I have felt towards you until you stop being stupid.”

“That’s definitely aggressive,” he agrees in the same dazed tone.

“Good,” she says decisively. “I don’t think you’d believe anything else.”

“I, uh,” Lance swallows hard and she can feel it where she has her hand fisted hard at his collar. “Maybe not, honestly.”

“I have another aggressive thing for you,” she tells him flatly and watches nervous trepidation flood across his face like a changing tide. “I am going to kiss you and it has nothing to do with grief or whatever else your, quite frankly, stupid insecurities think.”

“Um,” Lance says eloquently and Allura drags him into a kiss before he can say anything else that would embarrass the both of them. A shiver runs through his entire body before he melts against her, as sweet and pliant as a summer dream. When she lets him go he blinks at her, slow and heavy as if all of his thoughts were star systems away. “Um.”

She snorts indelicately. “If I do not love you already,” she tells him as blunt as a brick to the face. “I am certainly getting there fast. And if you argue with me I’ll have Blue sit on you.”

“Well,” he says slowly, tongue darting out to run along his lower lip as if chasing the taste of her. She hopes he was chasing the taste of her. “Not like I could argue with both of my best girls, now could I.”

“No,” she agrees, all stern imperiousness. “You could not.”

Lance stares down at her and then laughs low and stunned. He presses their heads together as gentle as anything and sighs. “I don’t know why I thought I could win against you.”

“And what would you win,” she asks, confusion heavy in her tone. “What do you even want to win?”

He rolls his forehead where it presses against hers and sighs again. “I don’t even know, Princess. I don’t have the damnedest clue.”

“Stop calling me Princess,” she complains, petulant and sulky as any toddler. “I have a name.”

He laughs at her, breath ghosting across her lips and she bites down hard on her own to keep from kissing him. Not at all the time, she chides herself, not even remotely. “You sound like Keith,” he murmurs.

“Well, then,” she says tartly. “Maybe you should call us by our names.”

He pulls back from her and cocks his head as he considers her, eyes sweeping up an over her from head to toe and back again. “Yeah,” he agrees slowly, and she can’t pinpoint the emotion lacing his tone like a hidden riptide. “Maybe I should.”

She thinks about asking him why he doesn’t. Why he finds nicknames and titles and appellations to slot in place instead of their names but she already knows the answer and it would be cruel to push. She’s already laid waste to too many of his walls like a conquering army; she can leave that one standing for a little while longer.

Allura slides her hands along his arms, catches his hands where they tremble like frightened birds, and smiles soft and slow at him. “You were leading me somewhere, weren’t you?”

He quirks a smile at her sly and playful tone before lightly tapping his forehead against her in silent rebuke. “Yeah,” he agrees, follows her unsubtle redirection. “I was. I found a place and I think you’ll like it.”

“This is my castle,” she reminds him as he pulls her along by one wrist as gentle and relentless as an evening tide. “I probably know it.”

“One thing I’ve learned, Princess—Allura, damn is that weird,” he mutters to himself, shaking his head. “Is that you don’t know your castle half as well as you pretend to.”

She frowns at the back of his head as he tugs her along. “That,” she says full of haughty dignity. “Is a filthy lie.”

Lance doesn’t bother to dignify that with a response, merely guides her along passage long and twisting until she can barely remember where they came from much less guess where they are headed toward. Millenia long sleep having long since stolen her memories of the castle’s plans. Instead she follows along in Lance’s wake like a skiff in a current, helpless and blind. 

They fetch up against one outer observation decks, it’s curving doors and cheerful markings giving it away as an entertainment lounge. Lance hold one palm against the lock pad and when it chirps a merry tune at his presence she raises one eyebrow at him, slow and sardonic.

“Pidge,” he says as if that explained everything. At it did. Both the how and the why in one tidy package of wheat-blonde hair and defensive sarcasm. 

“She is a terror,” Allura says in agreement, in recognition, in fondness that wraps around her heart like a blanket before a hearth fire. 

The doors peel back to reveal a long lounge fitted with low couches and plush pillows, but Lance ignores all of those to pull her before the windows that arch in a solid plane from floor to ceiling, baring them to the infinite vastness of space. She presses a hand to the window as swirling nebula dressed in myriad colors flickers past them. If she sighs, delighted and surprised, Lance says nothing where he stands at her shoulder watching the universe slip past them without a sound.

“My favorite place in the entire damned ship,” he says quietly. “I think I sleep here more than I do in my bed.”

“Is that why you are always late for emergency drills?" She meant for the question to be teasing, to be a sly joke, but it comes out breathlessly honest. Forced free of any dissembling by the sheer majesty of the solar systems twinkling before them in bewildering array. 

“Yeah,” Lance agrees with the same unashamed truthfulness. “Hunk covers for me most of the time.”

The impossible infinity of the universe makes her feel small and shameless, so she catches Lance’s hand and fits it around her waist. Snuggles herself to his side so he curves around her like the last bulwark between her and the rest of creation. Lance tucks her tighter to himself, tangles his fingers with hers over her stomach, and says nothing as they watch stars and black holes and planets and comic phenomena that still lack description run past the windows like water through a dam.

How long they stand there, still and watching the universe dance for them, Allura isn’t sure. Long enough for them to slide into a lazy sprawl in front of the window. Long enough for her to nestle herself against his chest, between his legs, in a comfortable mess of tangled limbs. Long enough for her to be lulled into drifting by his steady heartbeat and the feeling of his hand making lazy circles along her back.

They huddle like lost children against the bank of windows, held back from infinity by particle fields and aluminosilicate, and when they finally slide into the darkness of sleep neither of them dream.

> _I keep a close watch on this heart of mine_  
>  _I keep my eyes wide open all the time_  
>  _I keep the ends out for the tie that binds_  
>  _Because you're mine, I walk the line_  
>  "I Walk the Line" - Johnny Cash ([Halsey cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qjl4lysi_s))


End file.
